Beijing Hutong
Beijing is one of the world’s oldest 
functioning centrally-planned cities. The historic inner city, dating back to the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) is organized in a grid pattern. The horizontal lanes are known as “hutong”. The housing, restricted to be single-storey only until the end of the Qing empire, is organized around courtyards. The buildings themselves are built from the “blue” bricks and rooftiles characteristic for northern China.
Most courtyard houses (si-he-yuan in Chinese) were transformed into public housing in the 1950s, and today they are overcrowded and dilapidated, and lacking in infrastructure.
As a result of Beijing’s rapid urban re-development on a massive scale, many of these ancient structures have been demolished in recent years. But an intense discussion about the future of old Beijing has been raging in China’s capital for quite some time. The government has belatedly placed several areas under protection, since continued reckless demolition would be detrimental to the preservation of China’s cultural heritage. Yet rehabilitation concepts (beyond turning them all into bars and restaurants) are lacking.
Since 2002, in co-operation with Tsinghua University School of Architecture and local city management departments, THF has studied several Hutong neighbourhoods in great 
detail, looking at both architecture and social conditions. THF was reminded of conditions not only in Lhasa in the 1990s, but also of similar housing conditions in East Berlin, Moscow and St. Petersburg that some of us had experienced first-hand. According to our surveys, the majority of residents actually praise the life-quality of Hutongs in terms of social relations with their neighbours (developed over decades of having to live together in small spaces), security, greenness, quietness and, of course, the convenient location in the centre of Beijing.
There is also great beauty to the Hutong lanes, specially the view of huge areas of tiled roofs and trees. Even if architecturally a Beijing Si-he-yuan is not as complex and beautiful as an old Lhasa house, the debate over the future of old Beijing deeply interested THF.
Would it be possible to apply the participatory rehabilitation approach that we had developed in Lhasa to the Beijing Hutong?
Together with students from Tsinghua University, we spent two years carrying out a detailed study of three areas in Beijing, complete with architectural documentation and social surveys (“Beijing Hutong Study”, published in 2004).
We also developed pilot projects for rehabilitation of multi-family public housing.
Our published study (bi-lingual in Chinese and English) was introduced at a conference jointly hosted by Tsinghua and the embassies of Germany and France. 
Since then it has been widely distributed among Beijing municipal planning and housing departments. Even though our impact on this huge and ancient yet-so-quickly-changing city has been small, we have been happy to note that recently, the Housing Department has begun to rehabilitate some courtyards in a fashion similar to the one that we have been proposing.
Thanks to the Tsinghua U. participants:
Tsinghua University School of Architecture
architect/instructor Mr. Zou Huan
Students:
Yandai street survey group
Li Zhen
Huang Miaoyan
Wang Wei
Zhou Yiyu
Wu Yiqin
Cui Kai
Zhao Xinghua
Chen Shukun
Gulou area survey group
Guo Lei
Hu Yong
Yu Lejun
Chaodou Hutong survey group
Chu Yiping
Pang Cong
Chen Jing
and thanks to EFEO's Marianne Bujard